Introduction to Postmodern Literary Theory Agenda Why study literary theory?

Individual units of a linguistic structure only have meaning in relationship to other units

Do not go outside the myth or poem

Meaning is in the structure not the content

Sees language as a complete system in itself now (ignores historical evolution)

Ferdinand de Sausurre

• SIGNIFIER Sound or written word

• SIGNIFIED Meaning

• ARBITRARY RELATIONS—“Cat” could mean anything—what counts is that no other sets of signifiers mean cat

• Structuralist concerned with objective structure of signs —langue—system of language

• Not with any specific unit—parole

Ferdinand de Sausurre

• VALUE—collective meaning assigned to signs within a community; relation between various signs

• SIGNIFICATION—meaning—relationship between signifier and signified

• DIFFERENCE—the relation that creates value

• THE IDEA OF DIFFERENCE IS BASED UPON THE CONCEPT OF BINARY OPPOSITES

• Night/day; sweet/sour; body/soul; lightness/weight

Ferdinand de Sausurre

• LINEAR (SYNTAGMATIC) RELATIONS--words in time, in a sentence

• Position in sentence governs meaning :
• “The stoned man stoned the stone wall.”

• ASSOCIATIVE—similar words in memory

• Allow for metaphorical expression

• LANGUAGE SPEAKS US

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-)

• French anthropologist

• Took Saussure’s theories about language and applied them to the study of myth and culture

• Refused to see Western civilization as unique

• Savage mind = civilized mind

• 30 years studying North and South American Indians

• Man obeys laws that are inherent in the brain

• Myths are not made by an individual—but by the collective human consciousness

Claude Levi-Strauss

• Every culture organizes knowledge into binary pairs

• Different myths are all variations on a number of very basic themes

• A kind of grammar for narratives inherent in the human mind

• Certain constant universal structures called mythemes

• Structuralism decentralizes the individual (the subject)

• Meaning is not a private experience or divinely ordained

• Product of certain shared systems of signification

Claude Levi-Strauss

• LANGUAGE predates the individual

• REALITY is a product of language

• Jonah and Christ are the same story

• Thus all myths are timeless

• Hero needs to overcome an obstacle

• A story about a guy who loves a girl who is inaccessible
• Woman wants to make chicken soup has no chicken
• SAME STORY: incomplete/completeness

Claude Levi-Strauss

• STORY/NARRATIVE—exists on a diachronic axis (l to r) like music, irreversible time

• STRUCTURE—synchronic axis (up down) in reversible time, like staffs of score

• He focuses on the harmony of relationships, which he calls bundles

• BINARY OPPOSITIONS — lend a certain order and logic to things in the universe, and can be used to help people believe in contradictions—(yin and yang, god made man)

Claude Levi-Strauss

• Cadmos ravished by Zeus

• Oedipus marries mother

• Antigone buries brother

Structuralism

• Language and culture produce subjects (the “I” is decentered)

• Binary oppositions

• Literature reflects universal psyche of the human mind

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• The text represses its real content

• Patterns of language beneath the surface that betray repressions, obsessions, neuroses, etc.

• Dreams and imagery (especially sexual)

• Reader functions as psychiatrist, listening for verbal play in which the “patients” are saying more than they realize

• Author: Text reveals “secret life” and psychological struggles of the writer

• Characters: Look for psychological motives

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• KEY CONCEPTS:

• Id, Superego, Ego

• Resolution of Oedipus complex > the Self

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